SPECTRE: Hybrid Ordinary-Parallel Speculative Serving for Resource-Efficient LLM Inference

TL;DR

SPECTRE is a novel hybrid speculative decoding framework that enhances large-model inference efficiency by leveraging underutilized tail-model services through parallel draft generation and verification techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid parallel speculative decoding strategy with priority scheduling and prompt compression, significantly improving throughput in multi-model LLM serving systems.

Findings

SPECTRE achieves up to 2.28× speedup over autoregressive decoding.

It provides up to 66% relative improvement over existing speculative decoding baselines.

SPECTRE maintains minor interference with tail-model workloads.

Abstract

LLM serving platforms are increasingly deployed as multi-model cloud systems, where user demand is often long-tailed: a few popular large models receive most requests, while many smaller tail models remain underutilized. We propose \textbf{SPECTRE} (Parallel \textbf{SPEC}ulative Decoding with a Multi-\textbf{T}enant \textbf{RE}mote Drafter), a serving framework that reuses underutilized tail-model services as remote drafters for heavily loaded large-model services through speculative decoding. SPECTRE enables draft generation and target-side verification to run in parallel, and makes such parallelism effective through three techniques: a hybrid ordinary-parallel speculative decoding strategy guided by a threshold derived from throughput analysis, speculative priority scheduling to preserve draft--target overlap under multi-tenant traffic, and draft-side prompt compression to reduce draft latency. We implement SPECTRE in \texttt{SGLang} and evaluate it across multiple draft--target model pairs, reasoning benchmarks, real-world long-context workloads, and a wide range of batch sizes. Results show that SPECTRE consistently improves large-model serving throughput while causing only minor interference to the native workloads of tail-model services. In large-model deployments, including Qwen3-235B-A22B with TP=8, SPECTRE achieves up to \textbf{2.28$\times$ speedup} over autoregressive decoding and up to an additional \textbf{66\% relative improvement} over the strongest speculative decoding baselines. Talk is cheap, we show you the code: https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/pull/22272.